Recently I found out that the Sam Shepherd I've always enjoyed as an actor [esp Chuck Yaeger in The Right Stuff], is the same Sam Shepherd who is an accomplished playwright and author and whom I always assumed to be a different person. I have to say, he's a mighty impressive bloke on all three counts.

What other people would have comparable achievement and critical acclaim across at least three fields of the arts?

For the purpose of this discussion I think some longevity and sustained output in each field is required as well as the acclaim of peers. I would not include, say, The Adam Sandler Barbecue Recipe Book as evidence of him either being a writer or cook, so he remains a single threat [or annoyance may be a better word].

Martin Mull has an MFA in painting and started out as that, with work appearing in major art galleries over the years.

He is a singer-songwriter who recorded eight albums of comic songs since the 1970s.

He started acting after that, appearing movies like FM, Serial, and Mr. Mom and with roles on TV in Arrested Development (as Gene Parmesan); Roseanne; Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; America 2-Night, Two and a half Men; Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and others.

He also created the TV series Domestic Life (with Steve Martin, who used one of Mulls paintings for his album "Love as Come for You.")

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"If a person saying he was something was all there was to it, this country'd be full of rich men and good-looking women. Too bad it isn't that easy.... In short, when someone else says you're a writer, that's when you're a writer... not before."Purveyor of fine science fiction since 1982.

Warren Beatty had already earned Oscar nominations as an actor and a writer and a producer before he got Oscar nominations as the actor and writer and producer and director of one movie; and then, after getting Oscar nominations as the actor and writer and producer and director of another movie, he went back to earning Oscar nominations as an actor and a writer and a producer.

Now, pulling off that actor/writer/producer/director bit for one film at the Oscars? That's rare; it's crazy rare. But pulling it off twice? AFAIK, that's unheard-of.

Of course, his real talent was getting folks to say "uh, it's not vanity if he's right."

Stephen King--mega-novelist, guitarist (I don't think The Rock-Bottom Remainders recorded anything, but they [were?] playing benefit shows), and never-going-to-win-an-Oscar actor (I thought his performances were just fine for the movies he was in).

Hedy Lamarr, the actress habitually regarded as “that most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.

With his cameo in Knight of Cups, Peter Matthiessen qualifies.
Among other things, he was the only winner of National Book Awards for fiction and nonfiction.

From his New York Times obit:

"Mr. Matthiessen was a man of many parts: littérateur, journalist, environmentalist, explorer, Zen Buddhist, professional fisherman and, in the early 1950s, undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Paris. Only years later did Mr. Plimpton discover, to his anger and dismay, that Mr. Matthiessen had helped found The [Paris] Review as a cover for his spying on Americans in France."

Hedy Lamarr is more accurately described as an electrical engineer rather than a rocket scientist, since frequency-hopping is about the control of radio signals rather than about the building of rockets. Of course, she wasn't in any professional sense either one.

Here's an article about multi-talented people in the arts (although it's not totally accurate either, since it claims that Danica McKellar has a Ph.D., although she doesn't).

Some great suggestions, and so many people I'd never heard of before to discover.

Looking over them there are a few actor-director-producer-writer combinations. Without discounting anyone's achievements is this more of a phase-shift that happens in a successful long career compared to, say, Arnold Schwarzeneggar [body building - acting - politics] or my pin-up woman Geena Davis [acting - archery - social issues] that represent quite distinct domains?

Canada Lee -- Not well known today, but he had careers as a jockey, welterweight boxer, bandleader, actor (Broadway and movies), radio DJ (one of the first), and civil rights activist. His biography is fascinating reading.

He is indeed. We saw the Lawren Harris exhibit of which he was guest curator (mentioned in that article) at the Art Gallery of Ontario last year. Quite interesting, and they had his opening remarks on a video loop at the entrance.

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Originally Posted by HyacinthBucket

Viggo Mortensen

Not just a fine actor, but a publisher (Perceval Press), writer of poetry, books about the arts, nonfiction, some in Spanish and Danish, a photographer and a painter as well.

Not bad for a scruffy Ranger!

Yep. He's also a singer-songwriter, and at Howard Shore's request wrote the melody that Aragorn sings at his coronation in The Return of the King (at 3:45 here; the words are Tolkien's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJnyyta07k

One guy who does: Peter Weller, who's been teaching Art History for years. He's also been directing for years -- mostly television work, but also the project that got him an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film.

But the first line of his obituary will mention that he was the star of ROBOCOP.

Some great suggestions, and so many people I'd never heard of before to discover.

Looking over them there are a few actor-director-producer-writer combinations. Without discounting anyone's achievements is this more of a phase-shift that happens in a successful long career compared to, say, Arnold Schwarzeneggar [body building - acting - politics] or my pin-up woman Geena Davis [acting - archery - social issues] that represent quite distinct domains?

Even if the actor-director-producer-writer combo deserves short shrift -- and I'm not saying that it does -- mention should still be made of actor-director-producer-writer Barbra Streisand, for doing award-winning movie work in multiple fields in her spare time from racking up an over-the-top level of success as, y'know, a singer.

Dolph Lundgren - World-Class competitor in Japanese Karate, 3rd Degree Black Belt; Masters in Chemical Engineering and awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to M.I.T; and actor/(drummer)/director/producer.In Expendables 2 (I believe) the team leader remarks how [the character] has a Masters in Chemical Engineering and went to M.I.T.

Besides Peter Weller, among the celebrities in artistic fields who have Ph.D.s (and not honorary ones) are Brian May (astrophysics), Dexter Holland (molecular biology), and Mayim Bialik (neuroscience, just like her character in The Big Bang Theory):

One guy who does: Peter Weller, who's been teaching Art History for years. He's also been directing for years -- mostly television work, but also the project that got him an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film.

But the first line of his obituary will mention that he was the star of ROBOCOP.

Bryan May, guitarist for Queen and currently holding the record for the longest time keeping the same hairstyle, has a PhD in astrophysics. Not the arts, but awesome in itself.

Bryan May, guitarist for Queen and currently holding the record for the longest time keeping the same hairstyle, has a PhD in astrophysics. Not the arts, but awesome in itself.

Not only is he one of the greatest rock guitarists EVER, but he and his dad hand-made the guitar that Brian still plays back in the 1960s when he was just a teenager. So we can add "instrument maker" to his list of credits too. He's also written or co-authored several books on astrophysics.

And, speaking of Paul Newman, Robert Redford of course famously went from being an Oscar-nominated actor to being an Oscar-winning director -- and then, in his Sundance Film Festival days, to being an Oscar-nominated producer.

Since someone already said Steve Martin, I'll throw out Rupert Holmes. Known to most people (if known at all) as the singer of the song they love to hate, "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", he was also the creator and writer of the television show Remember WENN, wrote the musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the play Say Goodnight, Gracie, the libretto of the shows Curtains and First Wives' Club, AND wrote a novel called Where the Truth Lies.

A multi-talented guy, to be sure, and as someone who had the pleasure of meeting him, I can say he's also very gracious and sweet.

Isaac Asimov: Professor of Biochemistry, prolific writer of science fiction, mysteries, and non-fiction, covering diverse subjects of science, history, religion, Shakespeare, poetry (well, limericks), etc. He was also well known as a populariser of science.

Richard Feynman: Nobel prize-winning Physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He also was a much beloved teacher at Caltech in the years I was present. He had art exhibits, he regularly played the Bongos in campus stage productions, he taught informal classes on safe cracking and lock picking, he was infamous for his practical jokes, and his physics lectures have been required reading at many schools. He also conducted (informal) research on psychedelic drugs, and was a critic of what he perceived as math illiteracy among biologists and social scientists (he claimed that the state of the soft sciences was a shambles due to a total misunderstanding of basic math and statistics by members of those fields). Before Sagan, he was THE science guy, the person who could take almost any scientific concept and put it into terms that even a layman could understand.

And oh yeah, he solved the mystery of the Challenger disaster shortly before his death from cancer.

Recently I found out that the Sam Shepherd I've always enjoyed as an actor [esp Chuck Yaeger in The Right Stuff], is the same Sam Shepherd who is an accomplished playwright and author and whom I always assumed to be a different person. I have to say, he's a mighty impressive bloke on all three counts.

Are these not all highly related?

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What other people would have comparable achievement and critical acclaim across at least three fields of the arts?

Well, Shakespeare was an actor, playwright and poet. Christopher Marlowe was a playwright, poet, and translator.

Not really. I can't think of very many actors who are also playwrights, especially in recent times. Gene Wilder comes to mind, but his plays are not nearly as celebrated as Shepard's. Not only that, but his plays tend to be quite complicated and cerebral; a far cry from, say, Baby Boom.

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